What If? “click here”

This is an actual event concerning a Virginia store clerk at 03:00 hrs.

What If?

Why do you need to know more than basics if you are legally armed and you execute what you feel is a legal, defensive shooting? The majority of concealed carry classes only give the basics to qualify you for a concealed carry permit.
But, there are too many Conceal Carry Classes that are too short range when it comes to the legal aspects of being armed and deploying your firearm in a defensive scenario. For Self Defense issues, you not only need to be armed with a right to carry a firearm, especially concealed, you absolutely need to be armed with familiarization of what to do after the Echo so that you aren’t convicted of a crime, as in being taken to court as having committed a homicide. Learn the Rules!
Pathway Evolutions far exceeds that scenario of basics with a full two day Conceal Carry course.

You are a store clerk, legally armed, or as a legally armed shopper and an individual enters a convenience store with all intense and purpose to commit a robbery. The clerk, or you, for example, pulls a gun and fires at the intended robber flees out the door as the clerk fires shots and then steps outside and fires more rounds at the fleeing, alleged robber. Next morning, much to the surprise to a resident in the neighborhood they find a body on their back porch. The police link that body with what appeared to be a failed robbery the evening before and the District Attorney files a homicide charge against the store clerk, or yourself if you took the position of the clerk and the clerk who was unarmed as per store policy.

I expect that the clerk, or yourself, will seek to raise the legal defense of justification (self-defense) in response to criminal charges against him, but, perhaps he’s created a considerable vulnerability to his justification defense by his conduct.

Specifically, while it may well have been lawful to fire shots at the robber while the robber was in the store and presenting (presumably) an imminent deadly force threat, once the robber had fled, that “window of imminence” had closed.

With the robber in full flight out the door, the threat was over, no longer imminent, and thus the element of imminence required of a use-of-force justification claim, just as you should always look for a window of retreat if at all possible as in this case, the threat was no longer present. Absent that necessary imminence element, there is no justification for the continued use of deadly defensive force by the clerk or again, yourself if you presented yourself as the defender. What if, for lack of proof that the fatal shot(s) were in the store or on the street?

Such shootings are not acts of malice, but ignorance. Not intending to mean ignorance in a derogatory sense of the word, but in a technical perception—the defender had no idea that they had just stepped outside the bounds of lawful self-defense and opened the door to a felony conviction. Forty to Life prison sentence perhaps?